Sing, Sing You Ancient Broken Heart

Tonight someone's hunting. We've lost all of the heat out of the air where we are, so it's a little tougher to understand this. Most of the evidence comes from the other side of the headphones. It's going to be below freezing overnight for the first time in six months or so. It's getting to the point where everything changes here. We've seen the best of the year and now it's all a degeneration of nearly everything. It's all going to be taken from us until the Midwestern ground is as solid as granite. The birds are gone, the fields barren and bumpy. The lawns fade to one of the ugliest colors a person will ever see, making one of the sickest sounds as it's trod upon. While listening to the songs that Austin band Salesman worked on with the legendary MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, one gets the sense that the desert - a desert that may be nowhere near a person living in the state of Iowa on a mid-autumn night - has opened itself up and all of the bogeymen, with yellow eyes and night vision are tracking. Their senses are heightened and they can pick up the hot path that's been laid out. We're feeling like we need to hide. We need to get away because who knows what's coming down the pipe. It's the same feeling you get when you're driving home late at night and you've had just the right number of beers. You're right there in the legal line, perhaps. You aren't impaired, but that's not what the police are going to think and who is that following close behind you right now, but a police officer. The drive is excruciating. They stay right behind you. You are as conscious of the speed limit as you've ever been. Then you worry that you're playing it too straight and that no cop would ever believe that anyone would be so diligent about the speed of their car and you're going to get picked up for going exactly the speed limit, as if that would be suspicious and you were obviously up to no fucking good. It's that feeling, where you're just about as damned as you could ever be in your own head and shit's gonna get ugly in a hurry. They're on to you. You want to grow extra legs and make dust cruising off to the outer reaches of the deep, dark night, past the skulls, the vultures and the lizards, to find some place to lay low. Some of the songs played here were written specifically for an event that happened the same weekend of this taping, in Austin, called "Howling At The Moon," a benefit for Jail Guitar Doors. "Loving Dead," is an exception to some of the above descriptions, as lead singer Devin James Fry, but it could be the song that's sung when it feels like all is lost and the law, the bad guys, the desert or the hallucinations are closing in on that humid night. Fry sings, "Sing, sing you ancient broken heart," and they're the finest last words one could ever hear, or give one's self.